EducationWorld November 06

Developing an evalutaion cultureThere has been a significant and healthy improvement in the intensity and content of public discussions in India over the past two years. Several issues such as the right to information, employment guarantee and reservations in higher education have been fiercely debated. There has also been a refreshing shift in focus away […]

During the past seven years since this pioneer publication hesitantly ventured forth from the printing press to newsstand, tourism — particularly domestic tourism — has become big business. While the number of foreign tourists visiting India has remained stagnant at 3-3.5 million per year, the number of Indians visiting abroad annually has risen to almost […]

Time to liberalise language policy The recent turn of events in Karnataka state involving closure of 1,416 schools needs to concern all conscientious citizens. The schools were ordered to be closed for contravening their licences, which were supposedly granted to the schools to teach only in the vernacular. According to the state‚s education minister, it […]

An obsession with numbers is a national characteristic. How many? How much? These are standard questions that follow any causal statement. This numbers’ obsession is not indicative of greed or monetary fixation, but is driven by the belief that a substantial amount means quality assurance.

The recent well-attended and excellently conducted meeting of IGCSE schools […]

Letter from London

Engagement limits

“The main business of higher education is to teach students and to create new knowledge through research. However, if this knowledge and learning is to be useful it has to be applied to the areas of life where it can make a difference. This is knowledge transfer.” This quotation from a university […]

All that’s needed is one newspaper headline to instill fear in the minds of the populace. The dengue and chikungunya viruses have created a nationwide panic, and everyone‚s discussing their symptoms, cures, and the scare of it all. The latest scare is that aedes aegypti, the dengue-bearing mosquito, bites the ‚victim‚ during daylight hours. Not […]

Reassessing schools and schoolingIndia is still struggling to solve problems of yesterday, such as basic literacy, while simultaneously facing new challenges of tomorrow. And as new challenges emerge, there is no choice but to reform and invent new structures and content to solve problems of the past while also meeting challenges of the future.Inertia is […]

Your Counsellor RepliesI‚m in third year B.Sc and wish to qualify as a commercial pilot. Please provide details of colleges in America offering commercial pilot licence (CPL) training. Is it necessary to write TOEFL for admission?Rajesh Puri, New DelhiIt‚s advisable to writeTOEFL and submit its results with your admission application. The Florida Institute of Technology […]

There is a bright future for professionals in the fast-track gems and jewellery industry which is witnessing double digit annual rates of growth on the domestic and export frontsFrom modest beginnings in the sweatshops of Gujarat and Rajasthan, the annual foreign currency revenue of India‚s gems and jewellery industry has quadrupled from Rs.23,500 crore in […]

In my spare time, I like to referee high school basketball games. It’s my way of giving back to the sport and remaining updated with the various trends and attitudes exemplified by contemporary young athletes. One disturbing trend that came to my notice this past season was that over the span of the 30 or more […]

Levelling the ground for equal competitionIndia‚s future is not bright even though in urban India the ubiquitous malls, coffee shops and brand new cars give the impression of fast paced growth. Take Bangalore, for example. You can see an explosion of new state-of-the-art buildings of world class IT (information technology) multinationals which house thousands of […]

7×7 Concise History of Indian Education (1999-2006)The seven year period (1999-2006) during which EducationWorld has discharged its watchdog role as India‚s sole education news and analysis publication, has been perhaps the most eventful ever for Indian academia. For the first time in the half century since independence, public education has begun to move from the […]

Mandate of the 21st centuryAt long last, India is shaking off its chains to emerge a free nation. In many ways, what is happening harks back to the days of the 15th century when India was a prominent world trader, mostly in its peninsular region. In his book, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India published […]

Time for out-of-the-box solutionsAfter 59 years of independence, four of ten Indians are illiterate and to all intents and purposes barred from a prosperous future. Successive governments continue to launch schemes to promote Education for All. Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is the latest scheme under which the State continues to build more schools to ensure […]

A research study conducted by ICICI Bank reveals there is an urgent need for financial assistance to rural educational institutions in terms of investment in infrastructure to increase their enrollment and provide better academic facilities. The study indicates there are 80,000 privately promoted educational institutions running primary, secondary and higher secondary schools and colleges in India (10 […]

They said it in October”The minute you develop a new business model, it‚s extinct because somebody is going to copy it.” — Pepsico chief Indra Nooyi (October 8)”The exercise of Right to Information Act cannot be the privilege of the few. We must guard against the growth of professional middlemen in the use of this […]

Delhi

Rigid admission prescription

In what is widely interpreted as a sharp setback to the thriving business of play schools which rigorously prepare tiny tots for admission into kindergarten and nursery schools, on October 17, the Delhi high court banned admission interviews of toddlers as well as their parents.

The court accepted the recommendations of a […]

Thanks for the special report ‘Dismaying teacher shortage in Indian academia’ (EW October). My son attends a ‘five-star’ school in Bangalore and in the past four months has had three new maths teachers. This high attrition has affected not only his learning outcomes but has also diluted his interest in maths. When I paid up the […]

The outbreak of dengue in Delhi which has resulted in 34 deaths and choked hospitals in the national capital, and chikungunya down south which has infected 1.3 million people in Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh causing an estimated 525 deaths, has once again brutally impacted the issue of neglect of public healthcare upon the national […]

By any reckoning seven years of uninterrupted publishing is a significant milestone for a first-of-a-kind periodical. Especially if it‚s an entirely new genre publication focused upon the unsexy subject of education and published from a city which has no tradition of magazine publishing. Therefore how EducationWorld which took on the formidable challenge of waking the […]